The conventional postal system delivers street addressed mail items and “junk mail” advertising materials. Senders of mail items are not verified and receiver verification is inbuilt in that receivers of said mail items have to reside in the address to access the sent mail items. The only prerequisite the mail sender has to have is access to the addressee's postal address. This current mail system is in need of an electronic alternative to lift productivity levels, increase competition and add services that can only be delivered through an electronic platform.
At present, the existing electronic alternatives, email and web spaces for mail storage (e.g. bank statements) has not provided a comprehensive solution, partly due to the essentially unauthenticated nature of email correspondence and the inconvenience of the latter. Forging an email address is trivial and therefore the integrity of the entire email system can be compromised. Identity authentication via digital certificates and secure transmission through encryption is available as an add-on service for email services which only partially solves the problem of secure and authenticated communications. Public key infrastructure (PKI) design requires that every email account holder has public keys corresponding to every other email account holder that they may like to communicate with, which severely limits the scalability of the authenticated email service as a public alternative.
At the heart of internet communications lies a problem of authentication. The internet protocol (IP) addressing scheme does not include a default user authentication mechanism prior to accessing the internet. Web browsers access the internet using static and dynamic IP addresses. However, various organisations have adopted the PKI and use digital certificates signed by third party certificate authorities (CA) to identify themselves to users on the internet. Financial institutions use a digital certificate to confirm their identity to customers. What ensues is a one-way authenticated secure channel of communication. Authenticity and security are essential aspects that encourage participation in various activities including economic activities via the internet. So far most individuals who access the internet for communication purposes do not have an authenticated digital certificate that attest to individual or entity identity.
Unsolicited “junk mail” which fills conventional mailboxes has a location specificity. For example, the “pizza restaurant specials leaflet” from the local pizza restaurant get sent to nearby street addresses. “Junk mail” is from organisations and businesses that hope to attract attention from a target market selected largely by geographic locality. At present, recipients of such mail items do not have an opportunity to pre-select areas of interests and the lack of correlation between advertisers intent and a customers interest result in an enormous waste of energy and resources.
A comprehensive alternative approach for electronic delivery of location specific advertising items does not exist. Furthermore recipients of advertising mail items in existing platforms do not have a means of specifying their preferences. For example, recipients cannot specify that they may be interested in advertising material regarding local retail sales but not necessarily interested in local supermarket promotions.
Voice and video communications over the internet such as services provided by “Skype” lacks user authentication prior to engagement. Apart from users who are part of a private network or a virtual private network, user authenticated secure channel for audio and video communications do not exist in the public domain.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system for providing a secure and user identity authenticated communications service to overcome aforementioned problems and limitations. It is desirable to provide an integrated communications system where all participants are authenticated prior to engagement. Furthermore, it is desirable that the default addressing scheme be the street address scheme used by the postal services, which allows existing mail senders to use the electronic system using the information they already have. The use of street addresses also facilitate the required separation from existing email systems. It is also desirable for participants to be able to nominate areas of advertising interests or a lack thereof, enhancing the ability of advertisers to target advertising material with the establishment of a correlation between customer interest and advertiser intent.